Women, Citizenship and Difference

by Pnina Werbner (Series Editor)

This book makes an important contribution towards an understanding of citizenship as mediated by other collective, historically determined of gender, ethnicity, class and national status. It brings together a group of prominent international scholars from moral philosophy, law, political science and sociology to offer a major reconceptualization of the idea of citizenship.

Throughout, the book is concerned with the current dismantling of welfare states, the attack on civil society and the rise in state terror and religious and cultural findamentalisms. The contributors demonstrate how the growing ambivalence of state sovereignty in the face of multi-national capitalism and the absence of political accountability structures are complicit in the definitions of gendered citizenship. Against these, women's communal mobilization and political activism are considered in terms of their power effects and political potentialities; the book as a whole shows the need to negotiate and transcend difference and to find means for creating alliances across differences.

The most comprehensive, comparative statement on the present state of the gender and citizenship debate available, this book will be necessary reading for students and academics of nationalism, citizenship, human rights, globalization and women's studies.

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 1999

About the author

Pnina Werbner is Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, and author of The Manchester Migration Trilogy, including The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings among British Pakistanis (Berg Publishers, 1990, 2002), Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims (2002) and Pilgrims of Love: the Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (2003). In 2008 she edited Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives (Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), and is the editor of several theoretical collections on hybridity, multiculturalism, migration, and citizenship. She has researched in Britain, Pakistan, and Botswana, and has directed major research projects on the Muslim South Asian, Filipino, and African diasporas. Her forthcoming book is The Making of an African Working Class: Law, Politics and Cultural Protest (Pluto, 2014).